Jon Hendricks

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents. There must be respect for the people that have gone before.

I haven’t a great Jazz band and I don’t want one.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

I have a lot of albums yet to do.

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.

You don’t rehearse Jazz to death to get the camera angles.

The main thing is you want to emote.

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.